Niamh and I met when I was twenty-three, outside a pub in Temple Bar, both of us pretending we had only stepped out for air. I was all noise then. I wore a leather jacket even in July, quoted books I had half-read, and believed every night had to become a story by morning. She laughed at that version of me like he was a firework. Reckless, bright, impossible to hold for long.
We were together for nearly six years. In the beginning, Dublin felt built for us. We ate chips on the kerb after gigs, kissed under the rain near George’s Street Arcade, and rented a damp little flat in Stoneybatter where the windows shook when buses passed. We had no money, but we had a way of making poverty feel romantic. I worked in cafés, she worked in a bookshop, and on Sundays we walked through the Phoenix Park talking about the places we would go when life finally started.
Then life did start, but not in the way we had imagined. My father got sick, and I moved back to help my mother in Cabra. I began working steady hours in an office near the quays. I stopped going out during the week. I stopped drinking the way I used to. I stopped being available for every last-minute plan, every lock-in, every dramatic walk home at 3 a.m. At first, I thought this was growing up. I thought Niamh would be relieved. Instead, I could feel her searching my face for someone who had left the room.
She never said it cruelly. That was the hardest part. She would say, “You used to be up for anything,” while I was washing dishes. Or, “Remember when you’d just hop on a train with me?” when I said I couldn’t miss work on Monday. Once, after a friend’s birthday in The Workman’s Club, she looked at me across the table and said, softly, “You’re so calm now.” It sounded like an accusation.
I tried to resurrect him for her. I really did. One Friday, after my father had come home from hospital and the whole house smelled of medicine and boiled potatoes, I changed shirts three times and met her in town. I drank too quickly. I told loud stories. I climbed onto a bench outside a chipper and sang some stupid song from our early days while she laughed with her hand over her mouth. For a few hours, I saw her looking at me the old way, full of delight and recognition. But by the time we got back to her place, I was exhausted in a way I couldn’t hide. I sat on the edge of the bed and started crying without warning.
She put her arms around me, but I felt the confusion in her body. Not rejection exactly. More like grief. She missed someone, and I was the only person alive who knew exactly who he had been.
The end came on a cold evening by the Grand Canal. We had agreed to meet after work, and I already knew something was waiting for us. She arrived in a red scarf I had bought her in Galway, and for a minute I hated how beautiful she looked. We walked without touching hands. The water was dark and still, and cyclists kept flashing past like brief warnings.
She said, “I don’t think I know how to love you now.”
I nodded because the sentence hurt, but it also made sense. She cried then, properly, not because she wanted to leave but because she had been trying not to. I told her I was angry, though I wasn’t sure at whom. At my father for getting ill. At myself for changing. At her for wanting the boy I had outgrown. At time, maybe, for being so ordinary and so brutal.
We sat on a bench until the cold came through our coats. She said she would always love me, and I believed her, but I understood then that love can be honest and still not be enough. Sometimes a person loves a photograph of you so deeply they cannot forgive you for becoming the person who walked out of the frame.
We didn’t make a scene. There was no final speech worth remembering. I walked her to the Luas, and when she stepped on, she pressed her palm to the glass. I raised mine back. It felt embarrassingly like something from a film, except no music rose, and nobody ran after anybody. The doors closed. She disappeared toward the
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
